1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Our friend Neil Wolf likes to tell
the story of one of his patients who was very cheerful. The man was so full of
joy, and from the things he was saying, the doctor asked him, are you a
Christian? The patient smiled with joy and said, “Oh, I’ve been a Christian all
my life. But I was born again three years ago!” How do you explain that kind of
talk? Last Thursday I listened to my friend Don Hoitenga tell of his
brother-in-law. The man is seventy years old. And after his wife survived
cancer, with some miraculous intervention, the man called Don last Wednesday to
say, “Don, I gave my heart to the Lord last night. I know I’ve been in church
all my life and maybe you thought I was a Christian. But I’ve really been a
hypocrite, until now.” But the Don said it’s the same for him. He didn’t meet
Jesus until he was fifty. And he had been in church all his life. How do you explain that kind of talk?
The faith we live, isn’t just the way we were raised, a philosophy, a moral ethic or a good idea. It is all based on each person who becomes a believer through having some kind of personal encounter with the risen Lord Jesus. If you were raised among a group of people who told you they were Christians and raised you in the faith, that doesn’t mean you are a Christian, not even if you live by all the moral training that goes with that and we see you in church every week. Until you personally meet Jesus, and know that he has dealt with your sin and guilt, your faith is just a religion. Of course you call yourself a Christian, by default, but not by the Spirit.
All the people mentioned in these eleven verses were Jews, genetic descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Many of them tried to live like it. They practiced a religion that was handed down to them as revealed by the God of Heaven. They knew that only their God was the real God. Their history of deliverance from Egypt, establishment of the kingdom of Israel, abolishment into exile as punishment for their sins and then re-establishment and return from exile exactly as the prophets among them said all along, had taught them that they really were the chosen people especially cared for by the God of the universe like no other people.
They might have been very well behaved for the most part, and some of them were very religious. But none of them were genuine followers of Jesus until they met the risen Lord. At least one of them, Paul the apostle himself, was a devout Pharisee. He really lived the faith, as he understood it. He studied, knew and recited the Word of God. He regularly worshipped the one true God with all his heart, mind and soul. That’s what he really believed he was doing. But as you know, until he met Jesus, as religious as Paul was, as much as he thought he was a good Jew in the right religion given to the world by the one true God, Paul was actually an evil, murderous persecutor of the church! Even though he lived in the one true religion, he lived it out in direct opposition to the will of the one true God.
And all the rest of the people Paul mentioned, none of them were inclined to believe in the risen Lord Jesus. They certainly weren’t eager to. Even though the Word of God itself supports and prophecies about the true nature of the ministry of the Messiah, their Jewish faith didn’t lead them to believe that a man might really come back from the dead just because he talked about it before he died. And they didn’t think the True Messiah wasn’t supposed to die anyway and certainly not be cursed of God by hanging on a tree! That was not the way they understood Messiah’s role in the world. Only John gave an indication in his gospel that he thought maybe he should believe it when he saw the empty tomb. But even he wouldn’t have stood up and proclaimed that Jesus is indeed risen from the dead if he hadn’t actually met the risen Lord Jesus, and touched him. We know that the believers were bereft of all their hopes and grieving the loss of the one they thought was their Messiah.
Then, he appeared to them! That’s what made all the difference. “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, … he was buried, … he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and … he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep (at the time that Paul wrote this). Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
Paul says he was abnormally born for two reasons. All the other people to whom Jesus appeared were his followers, disciples and even apostles before Jesus’ crucifixion, but not Saul. He was a Pharisee. He would have been one who joined in with the ones who wanted Jesus to be crucified as a blasphemous heretic. He was not at all sympathetic to the cause of Christ the way the other five hundred plus people he mentioned were. He was an enemy of Christ, not a friend, so that was abnormal. Also, Jesus Christ appeared to everyone else except for Paul before Jesus ascended into Heaven. Jesus appeared to Paul in a sort of special return after his official ascension. So that also seems a bit abnormal.
For these two reasons Paul says, “I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” Right there he acknowledged his guilt and his false faith. Next he gives glory to God when he says, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”
What is it like to meet Jesus? Here’s a good story. Little league. Eight year old boy named Tim. He played left field. He was not the best player on the team. He never had made a hit. But here he was in a big game. Bases loaded, score was 3-2 with his team losing by one point. It was the seventh inning, the last inning of the game, and Tim was up to bat. The whole game now rested on his shoulders. His whole family had come out to watch the game. There must have been two hundred people in the stands, plus his family. On one side, all the supporters of the other team were yelling at him to strike out. On his side, everybody yelling at him to get a hit, even a single would save the day.
The stress on him was incredible for a little boy to bear. The pitcher on the mound looked like a giant. He wound up and the ball came in so fast little Tim never even saw it. The umpire yelled, “Strike one.” Poor little Tim. He raised the bat to his shoulder, waited for the pitch, here comes the wind up. Another fast ball but this time he swung, and missed. “Strike two.” He stepped out of the batter’s box to think and try to calm down. He looked at the pitcher who was eying him with a confident smirk. He gritted his teeth and stepped into the box. There was no backing out. He saw the wind up, and trying to anticipate that fast ball, it seemed as if he started swinging before the ball even left the pitcher’s hand. Yep. He heard it, “Strike three!”
Half the crowd erupted into cheers and applause and laughter. The other half, his half loudly expressed their disappointment in the little boy who had thrown their game. He heard the jeers and the name calling as he slunk back to the dugout, head down, and tears flowing. He had really messed up. He had struck out and upset everybody. He sat there crying for a long time. Here he had been trying with all his might to be a good little league player, the way some people try with all their might to be good Christians, and he had struck out. He had totally blown it, he had let everybody down. Now he felt nobody could love him, the way some people who have really messed up their lives and disregarded the Christian training they were raised in more or less believe that God couldn’t love them.
Then he heard a voice. “Look up son. The game ain’t over yet.” He thought about that for a while but didn’t move and didn’t look, of course the game was over. Then he heard it again, “Hey son, the game ain’t over. You’re up to bat again.” It was a familiar voice. This time he looked and there was his dad on the pitcher’s mound. Everybody else had left the stands to go home. Not only that, but his whole family was out on the field. “Come on son, let’s play.”
Timidly, Tim went back to the batter’s box for his turn at bat. Some kind of illegitimate do over. But he decide to humor them. The ball came in slow and easy. He managed to bump it a grounder rolled back toward the pitcher’s mound. His dad picked up the ball, and dropped it again as Tim headed for first base. By the time dad threw it to first, Tim was headed for second everybody cheering him on. First base cousin flipped the ball out toward second, but it went way over his sister’s head and she had to run for it while he rounded second. At third base stood his uncle, waiting to catch a ball that would have to come out of nowhere, for he was blind. Sure enough the ball rolled by him and somebody else chased it down as Tim headed for home. By now he knew it was a set-up, just to cheer him up. But it didn’t matter.
He dove for home plate like a champion and slid in safe. Then his dad came running in tears rolling down his cheeks. That was funny, now Tim was laughing and his dad was crying. His dad picked him up and said, “Son, you’re always safe at home.” Over and over he said it, “Remember son, you are always safe at home.”
That’s the gospel. God, our heavenly Father, loves us with an infinite love that will never look down on us for our failures. He runs to us with tears in his eyes, just the same way he ran to the prodigal son when he came home from wandering in sin. God wants to pick you up in his loving arms and say, “Hey, the game ain’t over. Even if you really screw up bad, the game ain’t over. You get up and you get to bat again. There is no condemnation for any failure. If you trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for your salvation them you are saved. Just stay in the game and give it your best shot. Let God train you and coach you. He will make something of you if you don’t give up. Don’t condemn yourself. Accept his forgiveness and get back in that game of serving the Lord with joy and gladness.
You know in most of Paul’s letters to the churches he reminded them of the gospel message first and worked at encouraging faith in the amazing grace of God towards us. Then he would move into instruction saying in effect, because we have all this from God, let us live accordingly. But I noticed in this letter to the Corinthian church that he has actually spend most of the first 14 chapter of the letter, almost three quarters of the material, instructing them about their errors and rebuking them for gross sins in the body of the congregation.
Now in the 15th chapter of his letter he gets back to the gospel to give them hope. That’s what made me think the story of the little league player is a good fit here. The church at Corinth had struck out badly. They were committing many errors and needed some serious correction. But the whole point of that correction was not to condemn them or take them out of the game. It was to enable them to do better and succeed in carrying out the mission of the church. This long letter full of correction of errors in the church means that the game ain’t over.
Paul ends this section saying in verse 11, “This is what you believed” that Jesus Christ really did die for your sins and really did rise again in his physical body. He started out saying, “By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you.” Here his list of all the people to whom Christ appeared is to provide the evidence that in fact Christ was raised from the dead with a physical body. Many people saw him and touched him.
In verses 1-11, that is what Paul is focused on, “Jesus is real.” There are physical consequences of our obedience or disobedience today and for eternity! This is not just motivational talk, as in so many other religions that try to convince you to be good. This is real truth about the fact that we can’t be good without the work of Jesus Christ at work in our lives today so that we still have a life on into eternity.
Now today we are in a special class of people. Jesus was talking about us when he said, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Jesus doesn’t have appear to us the way he appeared to the original believers. The Holy Spirit is abroad and we meet the risen Lord as He works in our hearts to convince us of his reality. You have heard my testimony before that I was raised in the faith and walked away from it as a teenager and messed up my life and was restored when God proved his love for me through the special circumstances of a letter in the mail that proved to me that He knew all about me, in answer to a prayer in which I asked him to do exactly that.
I was a prodigal son, one of those who has experienced the love of God the way the prodigal did on the road to his own home. God ran to me and celebrated my return. I felt his warm embrace and welcome and forgiveness. So I know I met God even though I never saw him. Now I know there are those in whom the Spirit of God has been working from their youth up. They were raised in the faith and they lived it out. But many of them are actually false. Just like Paul before he met Jesus. They are the reason that the church in America is growing so slowly. The church us growing fastest in the most dangerous places to be a Christian. There, you wouldn’t dare let anyone think you might be a Christian, unless you are willing to die for it. And that’s where the people who hear the testimony of Christians are impressed by the fact that those Christians are willing to die for a faith that matters that much to them. So the church grows.
There are people in this room who think they have been faithful Christians all their lives. You can’t remember a time when you didn’t believe in Jesus, and you certainly were never a misbehaving unbeliever like me. But you are the ones who have to be most careful about whether or not your faith is genuinely based on a real relationship with Jesus in which you know him to be part of your life through the work of the Holy Spirit.
You are the ones who have to be careful that you are not like the older brother in the story of the prodigal son. You know, he wasn’t genuine either. He didn’t love his long lost brother the way his father did. If the Spirit of the living God is not in you, you might actually be opposed to the work that God really wants to do among us, even though you think you are on the right track, just like Paul did before he met the Lord. Yes you are the ones who must think deeply about whether your faith in Jesus is just culturally trained into you, or really Spirit led.
Have you really given your heart to the Lord like the people mentioned in my introduction to this message? Or do you just think you are a Christian because you have known nothing else?
Let us pray. Lord, I am not pointing any fingers. I hope every single person in this room is a genuine believer, even me. You know how I often question my own faith since I do not really live it out as perfectly and sinless as I wish I could. I cannot base my faith on the fact that I know I met you once in my youth. I have to keep on meeting with you every day. Risen Lord, strengthen my faith. Risen Lord Jesus, bless all your people with real spiritual encounters with your living presence as we seek you and long to do your will. Amen.
The faith we live, isn’t just the way we were raised, a philosophy, a moral ethic or a good idea. It is all based on each person who becomes a believer through having some kind of personal encounter with the risen Lord Jesus. If you were raised among a group of people who told you they were Christians and raised you in the faith, that doesn’t mean you are a Christian, not even if you live by all the moral training that goes with that and we see you in church every week. Until you personally meet Jesus, and know that he has dealt with your sin and guilt, your faith is just a religion. Of course you call yourself a Christian, by default, but not by the Spirit.
All the people mentioned in these eleven verses were Jews, genetic descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Many of them tried to live like it. They practiced a religion that was handed down to them as revealed by the God of Heaven. They knew that only their God was the real God. Their history of deliverance from Egypt, establishment of the kingdom of Israel, abolishment into exile as punishment for their sins and then re-establishment and return from exile exactly as the prophets among them said all along, had taught them that they really were the chosen people especially cared for by the God of the universe like no other people.
They might have been very well behaved for the most part, and some of them were very religious. But none of them were genuine followers of Jesus until they met the risen Lord. At least one of them, Paul the apostle himself, was a devout Pharisee. He really lived the faith, as he understood it. He studied, knew and recited the Word of God. He regularly worshipped the one true God with all his heart, mind and soul. That’s what he really believed he was doing. But as you know, until he met Jesus, as religious as Paul was, as much as he thought he was a good Jew in the right religion given to the world by the one true God, Paul was actually an evil, murderous persecutor of the church! Even though he lived in the one true religion, he lived it out in direct opposition to the will of the one true God.
And all the rest of the people Paul mentioned, none of them were inclined to believe in the risen Lord Jesus. They certainly weren’t eager to. Even though the Word of God itself supports and prophecies about the true nature of the ministry of the Messiah, their Jewish faith didn’t lead them to believe that a man might really come back from the dead just because he talked about it before he died. And they didn’t think the True Messiah wasn’t supposed to die anyway and certainly not be cursed of God by hanging on a tree! That was not the way they understood Messiah’s role in the world. Only John gave an indication in his gospel that he thought maybe he should believe it when he saw the empty tomb. But even he wouldn’t have stood up and proclaimed that Jesus is indeed risen from the dead if he hadn’t actually met the risen Lord Jesus, and touched him. We know that the believers were bereft of all their hopes and grieving the loss of the one they thought was their Messiah.
Then, he appeared to them! That’s what made all the difference. “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, … he was buried, … he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and … he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep (at the time that Paul wrote this). Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
Paul says he was abnormally born for two reasons. All the other people to whom Jesus appeared were his followers, disciples and even apostles before Jesus’ crucifixion, but not Saul. He was a Pharisee. He would have been one who joined in with the ones who wanted Jesus to be crucified as a blasphemous heretic. He was not at all sympathetic to the cause of Christ the way the other five hundred plus people he mentioned were. He was an enemy of Christ, not a friend, so that was abnormal. Also, Jesus Christ appeared to everyone else except for Paul before Jesus ascended into Heaven. Jesus appeared to Paul in a sort of special return after his official ascension. So that also seems a bit abnormal.
For these two reasons Paul says, “I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” Right there he acknowledged his guilt and his false faith. Next he gives glory to God when he says, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”
What is it like to meet Jesus? Here’s a good story. Little league. Eight year old boy named Tim. He played left field. He was not the best player on the team. He never had made a hit. But here he was in a big game. Bases loaded, score was 3-2 with his team losing by one point. It was the seventh inning, the last inning of the game, and Tim was up to bat. The whole game now rested on his shoulders. His whole family had come out to watch the game. There must have been two hundred people in the stands, plus his family. On one side, all the supporters of the other team were yelling at him to strike out. On his side, everybody yelling at him to get a hit, even a single would save the day.
The stress on him was incredible for a little boy to bear. The pitcher on the mound looked like a giant. He wound up and the ball came in so fast little Tim never even saw it. The umpire yelled, “Strike one.” Poor little Tim. He raised the bat to his shoulder, waited for the pitch, here comes the wind up. Another fast ball but this time he swung, and missed. “Strike two.” He stepped out of the batter’s box to think and try to calm down. He looked at the pitcher who was eying him with a confident smirk. He gritted his teeth and stepped into the box. There was no backing out. He saw the wind up, and trying to anticipate that fast ball, it seemed as if he started swinging before the ball even left the pitcher’s hand. Yep. He heard it, “Strike three!”
Half the crowd erupted into cheers and applause and laughter. The other half, his half loudly expressed their disappointment in the little boy who had thrown their game. He heard the jeers and the name calling as he slunk back to the dugout, head down, and tears flowing. He had really messed up. He had struck out and upset everybody. He sat there crying for a long time. Here he had been trying with all his might to be a good little league player, the way some people try with all their might to be good Christians, and he had struck out. He had totally blown it, he had let everybody down. Now he felt nobody could love him, the way some people who have really messed up their lives and disregarded the Christian training they were raised in more or less believe that God couldn’t love them.
Then he heard a voice. “Look up son. The game ain’t over yet.” He thought about that for a while but didn’t move and didn’t look, of course the game was over. Then he heard it again, “Hey son, the game ain’t over. You’re up to bat again.” It was a familiar voice. This time he looked and there was his dad on the pitcher’s mound. Everybody else had left the stands to go home. Not only that, but his whole family was out on the field. “Come on son, let’s play.”
Timidly, Tim went back to the batter’s box for his turn at bat. Some kind of illegitimate do over. But he decide to humor them. The ball came in slow and easy. He managed to bump it a grounder rolled back toward the pitcher’s mound. His dad picked up the ball, and dropped it again as Tim headed for first base. By the time dad threw it to first, Tim was headed for second everybody cheering him on. First base cousin flipped the ball out toward second, but it went way over his sister’s head and she had to run for it while he rounded second. At third base stood his uncle, waiting to catch a ball that would have to come out of nowhere, for he was blind. Sure enough the ball rolled by him and somebody else chased it down as Tim headed for home. By now he knew it was a set-up, just to cheer him up. But it didn’t matter.
He dove for home plate like a champion and slid in safe. Then his dad came running in tears rolling down his cheeks. That was funny, now Tim was laughing and his dad was crying. His dad picked him up and said, “Son, you’re always safe at home.” Over and over he said it, “Remember son, you are always safe at home.”
That’s the gospel. God, our heavenly Father, loves us with an infinite love that will never look down on us for our failures. He runs to us with tears in his eyes, just the same way he ran to the prodigal son when he came home from wandering in sin. God wants to pick you up in his loving arms and say, “Hey, the game ain’t over. Even if you really screw up bad, the game ain’t over. You get up and you get to bat again. There is no condemnation for any failure. If you trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for your salvation them you are saved. Just stay in the game and give it your best shot. Let God train you and coach you. He will make something of you if you don’t give up. Don’t condemn yourself. Accept his forgiveness and get back in that game of serving the Lord with joy and gladness.
You know in most of Paul’s letters to the churches he reminded them of the gospel message first and worked at encouraging faith in the amazing grace of God towards us. Then he would move into instruction saying in effect, because we have all this from God, let us live accordingly. But I noticed in this letter to the Corinthian church that he has actually spend most of the first 14 chapter of the letter, almost three quarters of the material, instructing them about their errors and rebuking them for gross sins in the body of the congregation.
Now in the 15th chapter of his letter he gets back to the gospel to give them hope. That’s what made me think the story of the little league player is a good fit here. The church at Corinth had struck out badly. They were committing many errors and needed some serious correction. But the whole point of that correction was not to condemn them or take them out of the game. It was to enable them to do better and succeed in carrying out the mission of the church. This long letter full of correction of errors in the church means that the game ain’t over.
Paul ends this section saying in verse 11, “This is what you believed” that Jesus Christ really did die for your sins and really did rise again in his physical body. He started out saying, “By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you.” Here his list of all the people to whom Christ appeared is to provide the evidence that in fact Christ was raised from the dead with a physical body. Many people saw him and touched him.
In verses 1-11, that is what Paul is focused on, “Jesus is real.” There are physical consequences of our obedience or disobedience today and for eternity! This is not just motivational talk, as in so many other religions that try to convince you to be good. This is real truth about the fact that we can’t be good without the work of Jesus Christ at work in our lives today so that we still have a life on into eternity.
Now today we are in a special class of people. Jesus was talking about us when he said, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Jesus doesn’t have appear to us the way he appeared to the original believers. The Holy Spirit is abroad and we meet the risen Lord as He works in our hearts to convince us of his reality. You have heard my testimony before that I was raised in the faith and walked away from it as a teenager and messed up my life and was restored when God proved his love for me through the special circumstances of a letter in the mail that proved to me that He knew all about me, in answer to a prayer in which I asked him to do exactly that.
I was a prodigal son, one of those who has experienced the love of God the way the prodigal did on the road to his own home. God ran to me and celebrated my return. I felt his warm embrace and welcome and forgiveness. So I know I met God even though I never saw him. Now I know there are those in whom the Spirit of God has been working from their youth up. They were raised in the faith and they lived it out. But many of them are actually false. Just like Paul before he met Jesus. They are the reason that the church in America is growing so slowly. The church us growing fastest in the most dangerous places to be a Christian. There, you wouldn’t dare let anyone think you might be a Christian, unless you are willing to die for it. And that’s where the people who hear the testimony of Christians are impressed by the fact that those Christians are willing to die for a faith that matters that much to them. So the church grows.
There are people in this room who think they have been faithful Christians all their lives. You can’t remember a time when you didn’t believe in Jesus, and you certainly were never a misbehaving unbeliever like me. But you are the ones who have to be most careful about whether or not your faith is genuinely based on a real relationship with Jesus in which you know him to be part of your life through the work of the Holy Spirit.
You are the ones who have to be careful that you are not like the older brother in the story of the prodigal son. You know, he wasn’t genuine either. He didn’t love his long lost brother the way his father did. If the Spirit of the living God is not in you, you might actually be opposed to the work that God really wants to do among us, even though you think you are on the right track, just like Paul did before he met the Lord. Yes you are the ones who must think deeply about whether your faith in Jesus is just culturally trained into you, or really Spirit led.
Have you really given your heart to the Lord like the people mentioned in my introduction to this message? Or do you just think you are a Christian because you have known nothing else?
Let us pray. Lord, I am not pointing any fingers. I hope every single person in this room is a genuine believer, even me. You know how I often question my own faith since I do not really live it out as perfectly and sinless as I wish I could. I cannot base my faith on the fact that I know I met you once in my youth. I have to keep on meeting with you every day. Risen Lord, strengthen my faith. Risen Lord Jesus, bless all your people with real spiritual encounters with your living presence as we seek you and long to do your will. Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment